In an ever-increasing popularity of using the Internet, geographic, language, and economic boundaries are no longer meaningful. Creativity and collaboration in music and art over the Internet appear in great demand. Developing products and services for both amateur and professional musicians with an access to broadband is highly desirable. The core problems of enabling a music conferencing session over an IP network are network latency, jitter, and packet loss. These problems prevent musicians from achieving comfortable, high-quality, smooth, low latency simultaneous performance of all parties in a music conferencing session.
Redmann et al., in U.S. Pat. No. 6,653,545, disclose a method and apparatus for remote real time collaborative music performance. Redmann, however, uses MIDI sound control system which is not the most favored sound control system and high latency problems are unsolved. Redmann et al. disclose that the latency of the communication channel is transferred to a local station or musician, and suggest that each musician accommodate the latency by naturally adopting the latency locally. Redmann et al., however, does not disclose a method or system to reduce latencies for real time high quality digitized audio performance. Puryear, in U.S. Pat. No. 6,974,901, discloses kernel-mode audio processing modules. Puryear also discloses that avoiding transfers to user mode reduces latency and jitter in handling audio data such as MIDI data. Puryear, however, does not disclose a solution for real time high quality digitized audio streams. Weisman et al., in U.S. Pat. No. 6,839,417, disclose a method and apparatus for conference call management. Although some problems related to conference calling have been resolved by Weisman et al., problems specific to music conferencing remain unsolved. It is typical that voice conferencing shows high latency, low quality audio, and that the number of participants who can speak simultaneously is typically no more than two. U.S. Pat. No. 6,974,901 by et al. discloses
Studies in psychoacoustics show that comfortable music performance is possible only in the case where the delay in sound between performances is no more than 50 milliseconds. Jitter poses another problem in music conferencing. Jitter is a variation in packet transit delay caused by queuing, contention and serialization effects on the path through the network. In general, higher levels of jitter are more likely to occur on either slow or heavily congested networks. Jitter leads to random variations of rhythm and adversely affects musicians in general.
Packet loss is another problem is IP network and it is generally known that packet loss distribution in IP networks is bursty, and that bursts are typically sparse rather than consecutive with length of several seconds during which packet loss may be 20 to 30%. Bursty packet loss has a severe impact on audio quality during a distributed musical performance. Although the average packet loss rate for music conferencing is low, the lost packets are likely to occur during short dense periods resulting in short periods of degraded quality. Therefore, there is a need for a system that improves sound quality. Furthermore, a demand for a system or software to keep latency level to the minimal values possible in live performance over the Internet is significantly increasing. The present invention provides a teaching that accomplishes the stated problem and in some embodiments, one or more of the problems have been reduced or eliminated.